Well, it's not like there's a deep water table at most of these places...

Isn't it also a whole lot cheaper and quicker to throw them up? If you're trying to get the grid back up, do you want to wait to dig a trench?

I also wondered how they'd move the boats. Especially the one parked on the roof.

That one's small enough that they probably used a pair of cranes to lift it down to an oversized flatbed trailer. The big boat hanging off the edge of the seawall was probably jacked up and had skids placed underneath and then very carefully pushed/pulled back into the water.

That one's small enough that they probably used a pair of cranes to lift it down to an oversized flatbed trailer. The big boat hanging off the edge of the seawall was probably jacked up and had skids placed underneath and then very carefully pushed/pulled back into the water.

It's not like the have the normal access problems of narrow streets around them.... There must be some big stuff far inland that needs cutting up though.

Also, a record radiation level found in a single fish (as it would appear from your link) does not necessarily mean the contamination of fish is increasing.

The article is a bit ambiguous, but I understand it as the fish being caught within the immediate (and sealed off with nets) surroundings, which makes it even less enlightening regarding general ocean/wildlife contamination.

It does however highlight how fucking insane it is that seafood and the ocean isn't monitored more.

In those photos there appear to be lots of missing buildings. How many people are still displaced from the direct tsunami damage?

The photos above are from a syndicated news release.. The street with what looks like a movie theatre marquee that looks exactly the same now as it did then? That's Futaba within the exclusion zone around Fukushima while the others, the plant itself excluded, are cities and towns outside the zone. While there have been multiple reports about corruption and delays building elsewhere, it's clear that, in comparison with the other pictures, cleanup there has been extremely limited assuming any has begun at all.

In those photos there appear to be lots of missing buildings. How many people are still displaced from the direct tsunami damage?

The photos above are from a syndicated news release.. The street with what looks like a movie theatre marquee that looks exactly the same now as it did then? That's Futaba within the exclusion zone around Fukushima while the others, the plant itself excluded, are cities and towns outside the zone. While there have been multiple reports about corruption and delays building elsewhere, it's clear that, in comparison with the other pictures, cleanup there has been extremely limited assuming any has begun at all.[/quote]

So we can say with confidence there are 80,000 displaced due to the radiation but can't even manage a guess how many are still displaced due to the tsunami damage?

Here's an analysis of the Fukushima accident presented recently at this year's NRC Regulatory Information Conference. The analysis attempts to give a plausible scenario of what went on during the accident based on the calculations and data.

Here's an analysis of the Fukushima accident presented recently at this year's NRC Regulatory Information Conference. The analysis attempts to give a plausible scenario of what went on during the accident based on the calculations and data.

Thanks UserJoe!

The slides do confirm a suspicion that I (and my collegues) had, namely that the primary containment head got lifted by the enormous internal pressure, leading to hydrogen being vented into the service and maintenance area of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plants.

What I found interesting is that at least for the oldest plant, a serious case can be made for the main steam line rupturing. I think that I mentioned this somewhere here already, but the depressurization of the of rector pressure vessel for Fuku-1-1 was way, way too late (I may have only discussed this with collegues, though). They apparently evaded a high pressure core melt rupturing of the RPV very narrowly.

Here's an analysis of the Fukushima accident presented recently at this year's NRC Regulatory Information Conference. The analysis attempts to give a plausible scenario of what went on during the accident based on the calculations and data.

Thanks UserJoe!

The slides do confirm a suspicion that I (and my collegues) had, namely that the primary containment head got lifted by the enormous internal pressure, leading to hydrogen being vented into the service and maintenance area of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plants.

What I found interesting is that at least for the oldest plant, a serious case can be made for the main steam line rupturing. I think that I mentioned this somewhere here already, but the depressurization of the of rector pressure vessel for Fuku-1-1 was way, way too late (I may have only discussed this with collegues, though). They apparently evaded a high pressure core melt rupturing of the RPV very narrowly.

I thought that lifting the head had been a focus of concern in the explosion of #3 and had not been previously suggested for #1.

Here's an analysis of the Fukushima accident presented recently at this year's NRC Regulatory Information Conference. The analysis attempts to give a plausible scenario of what went on during the accident based on the calculations and data.

Thanks UserJoe!

The slides do confirm a suspicion that I (and my collegues) had, namely that the primary containment head got lifted by the enormous internal pressure, leading to hydrogen being vented into the service and maintenance area of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plants.

What I found interesting is that at least for the oldest plant, a serious case can be made for the main steam line rupturing. I think that I mentioned this somewhere here already, but the depressurization of the of rector pressure vessel for Fuku-1-1 was way, way too late (I may have only discussed this with collegues, though). They apparently evaded a high pressure core melt rupturing of the RPV very narrowly.

The other real mystery of unit 1 is why the isolation condenser stopped working. It was shut off because it was bringing the pressure down too fast but they couldn't get the valves open again. If it worked unit 1 could have survived since only low pressure water was needed to keep it operating. Some news stories also say that TEPCO is blocking the regulatory authority from looking at the condenser.

Radioactive water stored in a large underground tank was found to be leaking between Wednesday and Friday. The utility estimates that 120 tons have leaked so far.

The water appears to contain Sr-90:

Quote:

TEPCO estimates that 710 billion becquerels of radioactive strontium, or about 3 times more than the annual allowable limit at the complex, has leaked.

That's about 6000Bq/liter. IIRC, few of the original reports documented Sr among the radioactive materials. I'm not sure whether that means they couldn't assay it, or didn't want to report the numbers, or there wasn't any.

Another example of hack science by people with an agenda. With a few minute Google search I found information that shows yearly fluctuations in CH are large. The authors used failed to point that out and even implied that year to year fluctuations were not large.

With a few minute Google search I found information that shows yearly fluctuations in CH are large. The authors used failed to point that out and even implied that year to year fluctuations were not large.

A generalized statement, some of the data show a high variance. The point of statistics is to separate out the wheat from the chaff, but statistics can be abused - these results could be a case of data mining with an agenda, or as mentioned:

Quote:

The data presented in this paper, including both exposure levels and CH incidence, should be considered as preliminary. They require confirmation and expansion, including long-term follow-up of infants and other children. However, the current findings should be noted, and encourage the conduct of future analyses of health effects from exposures to Fukushima fallout.

Congenital hypothyroidism can be used as one measure to assess any potential changes in U.S. fetal and infant health status after Fukushima because official data was available relatively promptly. However, health departments will soon have available for [analysis] other 2010 and 2011 indicators of fetal/infant health

There is a well documented link between radioiodine and thyroid function, public health concerns dictate some level of interest surrounding the incident.

The NY Times has a short article critical of TEPCO for its management and practices at the Fukushima clean-up. The article suggests that the recent leak of hundreds of tons of radioactive water was inevitable:

Quote:

But as outside experts have discovered with horror, the company had lined the pits for the underground pools with only two layers of plastic each 1.5 millimeters thick, and a third, clay-based layer just 6.5 millimeters thick. And because the pools require many sheets hemmed together, leaks could be springing at the seams, Tepco has said.

The article then quotes Muneo Morokuzu, "a nuclear safety expert at the Tokyo University Graduate School of Public Policy":

Quote:

It’s become obvious that Tepco is not at all capable of leading the cleanup. It just doesn’t have the expertise, and because Fukushima Daiichi is never going to generate electricity again, every yen it spends on the decommissioning is thrown away [and, of course, TEPCO is bankrupt anyway]. That creates an incentive to cut corners, which is very dangerous. The government needs to step in, take charge and assemble experts and technology from around the world to handle the decommissioning instead.

The NY Times has a story on cleanup. Apparently, it might take fewer than 50 years to cleanup around Fukushima, a lot fewer. There are questions as to whether or not permissible doses are being altered in the U.S. To me personally this is the big deal with nukes, how much ground do they fuck up for how long when they blow? It should be clear one's going to blow every once in a while. To me, that's OK given current casualty rates versus casualties associated with other sources of electricity. But screwing up tens of thousands of acres at a whack for 50 years is unacceptable for me.

Meanwhile, back at the plant, there is a report that the fucking pipes being used to drain the leaking ponds are now leaking. God, what a clusterfuck, at least from a PR perspective POST double meltdown and triple explosion. I guess at least one can say they are being somewhat forthcoming.

More from the NY Times on Fukushima. "Tainted Water Poses New Risks at Japan Reactor" is currently the headline on their website. Apparently, groundwater is pouring into the reactors, at a rate too high for TEPCO to manage all the radioactive water. A lot of the radioactive elements can be removed from the water, but there's 100x more tritium than is allowed to be dumped into the ocean (TEPCO's standard receptacle). I can't see that this is a solvable problem other than adding the tritium to the ocean; on the plus side tritium isn't very hazardous, and there's lots of tritium in the environment to begin with.

The natural occurrence of tritium is lower than I had thought. Only 1 in 1e+18 hydrogen atoms is tritium. I don't know what the limits are that Fukushima by exceed by 100x, so I can't calculate whether the release of all the tritiated water into the ocean would be a serious event.

More from the NY Times on Fukushima. "Tainted Water Poses New Risks at Japan Reactor" is currently the headline on their website. Apparently, groundwater is pouring into the reactors, at a rate too high for TEPCO to manage all the radioactive water. A lot of the radioactive elements can be removed from the water, but there's 100x more tritium than is allowed to be dumped into the ocean (TEPCO's standard receptacle). I can't see that this is a solvable problem other than adding the tritium to the ocean; on the plus side tritium isn't very hazardous, and there's lots of tritium in the environment to begin with.

Tritium is relatively harmless in terms of biological dangers. It dilutes simply too quickly to cause much damage. The dilution comes due to two things:

All biological things have a high water through-put. The biological half life of Tritium is of the order of a few days. Any Tritium that is incorporated becomes diluted from the constant stream of water that is absorbed and given off through the body. And since cells and its molecules are constantly being created and destroyed, Tritium atoms that replace a hydrogen atom also become liberated quickly. As long as it is a once-off exposure, the body gets rid of the Tritium very quickly.

Water is highly mobile in our environment. Even in the soil. It simply diffuses away any concentration gradients very rapidly. Even though nuclear power plants constantly emit very large amounts of Tritium (in terms of Bq, Tritium swamps all other emissions by three orders of magnitude), the Tritium is simply undetectable in the environment; even within the off-take water structures of the power plant.

More from the NY Times on Fukushima. "Tainted Water Poses New Risks at Japan Reactor" is currently the headline on their website. Apparently, groundwater is pouring into the reactors, at a rate too high for TEPCO to manage all the radioactive water. A lot of the radioactive elements can be removed from the water, but there's 100x more tritium than is allowed to be dumped into the ocean (TEPCO's standard receptacle). I can't see that this is a solvable problem other than adding the tritium to the ocean; on the plus side tritium isn't very hazardous, and there's lots of tritium in the environment to begin with.

Tritium is relatively harmless in terms of biological dangers. It dilutes simply too quickly to cause much damage. The dilution comes due to two things:

All biological things have a high water through-put. The biological half life of Tritium is of the order of a few days. Any Tritium that is incorporated becomes diluted from the constant stream of water that is absorbed and given off through the body. And since cells and its molecules are constantly being created and destroyed, Tritium atoms that replace a hydrogen atom also become liberated quickly. As long as it is a once-off exposure, the body gets rid of the Tritium very quickly.

Water is highly mobile in our environment. Even in the soil. It simply diffuses away any concentration gradients very rapidly. Even though nuclear power plants constantly emit very large amounts of Tritium (in terms of Bq, Tritium swamps all other emissions by three orders of magnitude), the Tritium is simply undetectable in the environment; even within the off-take water structures of the power plant.

I understand about the hazards. However, nothing can be said definitively about the hazards without knowing the actual amounts. The short biological half-life isn't important if you're a fish swimming the coast of 3H-Fukushima, and the ocean is uniformly labeled.